517 – Sliding Scale Ransom
Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men
Jay Edidin & Miles Stokes
4.7 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 9 March 2026
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In which we totally forgot to record a cold open (sorry); a lot of characters die (but not in Earth-616); Vampires may already be in command of America’s atomic arsenal; and we revisit a favorite.
X-PLAINED:
- What If vol. 2 #9
- What If vol. 2 #24
- What If: Magik #1
- Rahne Sinclair (moppet stage)
- The deaths of the Silver Age and All-New-All-Different X-Men
- Fancy television
- Sliding-scale ransom
- Then Ani-Men, somewhat
- The Living LASER, somewhat
- An orgy of satiation
- Wolverine, Lord of the Vampires
- Several highlights of Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose
- Vampire nonsense
- The Darkhold
- The Montessi Formula
- Some alligators
- August 5
- Frank Punisher, Vampire Hunter
- What If vol. 2 #37 (briefly)
- A kinder alternate history
- A singularly beautiful montage
- The Soul Staff
- Summers family connections
- How Wolverine climbs
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Jay Edidon. |
| 0:13.2 | And I'm Miles Stokes. |
| 0:14.7 | And we are here to Explain the X-Men. |
| 0:17.5 | Because it's about time someone did. |
| 0:19.3 | Welcome to episode 517 of Jay and Miles Explain the X-Men, where we walk you |
| 0:23.1 | through the ins, the outs, and the retcons of comics' greatest superhero soap opera. |
| 0:27.6 | And welcome to something we've been wanting to do for a very long time. |
| 0:30.6 | That's right, today we're going to be highlighting three issues, not of main continuity, not |
| 0:35.3 | of an alternate universe, but of three different alternate universes |
| 0:37.8 | in Marvel's classic What If? |
| 0:41.2 | Yeah, so I've always had mixed feelings about the what if series in large part because the question, what if, is usually answered by everybody dies horribly. |
| 0:51.7 | Like, if a single little thing changes in the Marvel universe, then everybody dies horribly |
| 0:55.8 | the end. |
| 0:56.4 | Like, that's so many what-if issues. |
| 0:58.6 | I mean, definitely one of the ones we'll be covering today. |
| 1:01.2 | Well, true. |
| 1:02.0 | But for the most part, we tried to find some that bucked that trend, or that was just |
| 1:08.2 | really interesting or just really fun. |
| 1:10.1 | And we enlisted the help of |
| 1:11.7 | our patrons we had a patron discussion where people recommended like x-men related what-if |
| 1:16.2 | issues that they liked and oh god we read through so many what-if issues and so many were fun like |
| 1:21.6 | you guys made excellent suggestions but eventually we were able to narrow it down to three |
... |
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